“Cole, you got the family you always wanted, and you walked away. I saw you with them. I saw you and Hailey together.”
“What does this have to do with you?”
“Because I wasn’t there. I’ve never been there. Not once. And now… now, I can be. Cole, you’re hurting. Anyone can see it. And if I go off and make another film, it’ll be more of the same thing. Me missing out on being there for you.” Gazing down at his boots, he shook his head. “I saw how you were with those girls, and I should have been that way with you.”
“I had knee surgery. I had nowhere else to go.”
“Bullshit. Mentally, emotionally, you were one hundred percent theirs. I’d never seen that side of you, and you damn well didn’t get it from me. All I did was show you a good time. My son’s sad? Take him to Bali. My boy’s lonely? Fill the house with strangers. Jesus, I watched you figure out what those girls needed and give it to them.”
“So, what’re you going to do? Buy a condo in Boston and go to all my games? Come to my parties?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll babysit my grandkids.”
Cole hung his head. “They’re not—”
“Yeah, they are. You know it as well as I do.”
“Dad, you’ve got to know I’m not good for them.”
“Because you lost Paisley for five minutes?” His dad came closer. “If you polled a hundred parents, ninety-eight would admit they’ve lost a kid, too. At the mall, the fair, in a hotel… Come on, you have to know that.”
“That’s what Hailey said.” He paced across the room and back to the desk. “You guys don’t get it. Remember Kevin? I broke his fucking arm. And Booker?”Jesus. There it was again, that image of him landing, his legs crumpling.Fuck. I’m a menace.
“You didn’t break Kevin’s arm. He broke it by riding his bike out of the second floor of a barn. That was his choice to make. But so what? When I was twelve, I took my dad’s tractor on a joy ride. I lost control and took out a quarter of one of his fields and then landed in a pond. That’s what boys do. They work hard to kill themselves. It’s amazing any of us gets to adulthood.”
“No, it was never my friends’ fault. They all knew when to quit. It was me. Every single damn time, right when they had to go home, I’d push it. With Kevin, we’d been dirt biking after school. Everyone had to get home for dinner. He would’ve been fine. Everything would’ve been all right if I’d just let them go, but what did I do? I suggested we ride our bikes out the window of the second story of the barn. Do you remember that speed skating idea I had on the Snake River?”
His dad nodded.
“We were on our way home from training… Booker had his sister’s birthday party to get to, Declan’s grandfather needed help with something. They all had to get home, and there I go suggesting we try skating on a river.”
He ran his hands through his hair, pulling at the roots. “All Jaime wanted was to have a bonfire. I was the one who stole your plane and took us to the cabin. There’s something wrong with me, Dad. I had the girls safe in your apartment. Everything was good. I didn’t need to take them to a damn screening. When I think of what might’ve happened to her…Jesus.” He dropped to a crouch, lowering his head into his hands. Grief roared through him, a pain so intense, so beyond his ability to stave it off, he thought he would lose his mind.
But then, he felt strong arms wrap around him. His dad didn’t say a word, just held him as the pain ran through him, dripping into every crevice, polluting every cell until it had nowhere else to go. Just fucking infused his body.
And when he stood up, he was so exhausted he collapsed into his chair. “I can’t hurt the girls the way I hurt Booker.”
“All this time, I thought it was guilt holding you back. But your problems don’t have anything to do with Booker. What happened that night’s a symptom. Tonight, I finally heard the cause.”
Cole waited, desperate to hear the words that might release him from this hell.
His dad put a hand on his shoulder. “Out of all the things you just said, the one thing that stands out is that every time you pushed for more, it was because you were about to go home and be by yourself.”
“Not with Booker.”
“It was the same thing. That was the night before the four of you were going in separate directions. Those boys were your family, and you were about to lose them. You were about to go out into the world on your own. What I hear is a boy who wanted to keep his friends with him, and to do so, he had to come up with a reason for them to stay. And over the course of a thousand wild adventures where everyone had the time of their lives, three people got hurt. Kevin broke his arm, Danny had hypothermia from skating on a river, and Booker shattered his tibia.” He tipped his head back. “I really hate myself right now. Knowing how lonely, how fucking isolated my son was…I can’t stand it.”
“It’s not your fault.”
His dad banged his fist on the desk. “It is completely my fault. You want to know why I’m retiring? Because I’m lonely, too. I’m surrounded by actors, camera operators, electricians, grips…but at the end of the day, I’m alone. But you—Cole, you have a family waiting for you, needing you.” He pointed to the door. Bass pounded under the roar of conversation. “You surround yourself with people just like I do, but none of them matters. The way I see it, we both have a choice. We can choose the same emptiness we’ve lived with all our lives—I can keep going with this franchise, and you can shut out Hailey and the girls—or we can both make the harder choice of taking a risk. You’re going to make mistakes. Things are going to go wrong—that’s just life. But that family loves you. They need you. What are you going to do?”
He hadn’t known it before because it had been the only life he’d ever known. But now that he knew a different life—a vastly more fulfilling one—he understood the stark loneliness he’d lived with for twenty-eight years.
The fear when he’d wake up as a little boy to a quiet house, to a nanny who’d ignored him, who’d tossed food at him like he was a stray dog.
The painful ache when the other parents would bring orange slices to practice, gather in little groups, and take pictures of their sons. No one had done that for him.
Theanxiety—yes, that was it—of sitting on the plane for a road trip. Trying to be funny, interesting…someone they’d want to hang out with.